Call for Papers
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ACM Multimedia 2009 Workshop
Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2009)
October 23, 2009
Beijing, China
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http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/
Multimedia content often contains spoken audio as a key component.
Although speech is generally acknowledged as the quintessential carrier
of semantic information, spoken audio remains underexploited by
multimedia retrieval systems. In particular, the potential of speech
technology to improve information access has not yet been successfully
extended beyond multimedia content containing scripted speech, such as
broadcast news. The SSCS 2009 workshop is dedicated to fostering search
research based on speech technology as it expands into spoken content
domains involving non-scripted, less-highly conventionalized,
conversational speech characterized by wide variability of speaking
styles and recording conditions. Such domains include podcasts, video
diaries, lifelogs, meetings, call center recordings, social video
networks, Web TV, conversational broadcast, lectures, discussions,
debates, interviews and cultural heritage archives. This year we are
setting a particular focus on the user and the use of speech techniques
and technology in real-life multimedia access systems and have chosen
the theme "Speech technology in the multimedia access framework."
The development of robust, scalable, affordable approaches for accessing
multimedia collections with a spoken component requires the sustained
collaboration of researchers in the areas of speech recognition, audio
processing, multimedia analysis and information retrieval. Motivated by
the aim of providing a forum where these disciplines can engage in
productive interaction and exchange, Searching Spontaneous
Conversational Speech (SSCS) workshops were held in conjunction with
SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam and with SIGIR 2008 in Singapore. The SSCS
workshop series continues with SSCS 2009 held in conjunction with ACM
Multimedia 2009 in Beijing. This year the workshop will focus on
addressing the research challenges that were identified during SSCS
2008: Integration, Interface/Interaction, Scale/Scope, and Community.
We welcome contributions on a range of trans-disciplinary issues related
to these research challenges, including:
***Integration***
-Information retrieval techniques based on speech analysis (e.g.,
applied to speech recognition lattices)
-Search effectiveness (e.g., evidence combination, query/document expansion)
-Self-improving systems (e.g., unsupervised adaptation, recursive
metadata refinement)
-Exploitation of audio analysis (e.g., speaker emotional state, speaker
characteristics, speaking style)
-Integration of higher-level semantics, including cross-modal concept
detection
-Combination of indexing features from video, text and speech
***Interface/Interaction***
-Surrogates for representation or browsing of spoken content
-Intelligent playback: exploiting semantics in the media player
-Relevance intervals: determining the boundaries of query-related media
segments
-Cross-media linking and link visualization deploying speech transcripts
***Scale/Scope***
-Large-scale speech indexing approaches (e.g., collection size, search
speed)
-Dealing with collections containing multiple languages
-Affordable, light-weight solutions for small collections, i.e., for the
long tail
***Community***
-Stakeholder participation in design and realization of real world
applications
-Exploiting user contributions (e.g., tags, ratings, comments,
corrections, usage information, community structure)
Contributions for oral presentations (8-10 pages) poster presentations
(2 pages), demonstration descriptions (2 pages) and position papers for
selection of panel members (2 pages) will be accepted. Further
information including submission guidelines is available on the workshop
website: http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/
Important Dates:
Monday, June 1, 2009 Submission Deadline
Saturday, July 4, 2009 Author Notification
Friday, July 17, 2009 Camera Ready Deadline
Friday, October 23, 2009 Workshop in Beijing
For more information: m.a.larson [at] tudelft.nl
SSCS 2009 Website: http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/
ACM Multimedia 2009 Website: http://www.acmmm09.org
On behalf of the SSCS2009 Organizing Committee:
Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Franciska de Jong, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Joachim Kohler, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany
Roeland Ordelman, Sound & Vision and University of Twente, The Netherlands
Wessel Kraaij, TNO and Radboud University, The Netherlands